‘Interview With the Vampire’ Renewed for Season 3 — Which Book Is It Adapting?

Do you know what it means to be loved by death? Well if you’re an Interview with the Vampire fan, you do…and you’re gonna get more of that deadly love. Plus a whole lot more.

Just days before its second season finale, AMC has announced that its stellar adaptation of Anne Rice‘s seminal novel will be coming back for a third season. As the flagship series in the network’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe, the sultry, sexy, and currently heartbreaking Interview has been one of the TV season’s most critically acclaimed entries, has staked out 98-point scores for both its first and second seasons on Rotten Tomatoes, and is the No. 1 series for viewership and acquisition on AMC+ over the last year, with the exception of The Walking Dead universe shows.

The series is executive produced by award-winning producer Mark Johnson (who oversees the Immortal Universe), creator, writer and showrunner Rolin Jones, Mark Taylor, along with Christopher Rice and his late mother. Last month, AMC also greenlit Anne Rice’s The Talamasca (working title) as the Immortal Universe’s third series, joining Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, which is currently in production on its second season.

Larry Horricks/AMC

Now here’s the juicy part: Yes, Season 3 will adapt Rice’s 1985 sequel to Interview, The Vampire Lestat, which means we will get to see Sam Reid‘s ancient bloodsucker unleash his inner rock star. Per AMC’s release…

“In Season 3, resentful of the perfunctory portrayal in the trashy bestseller Interview With the Vampire, the Vampire Lestat sets his story straight in a way only the Vampire Lestat can—by starting a band and going on tour. Gabrielle. Nicolas. Magnus. Marius. Those Who Must Be Kept. They join Louis, Armand, Molloy, Sam, Raglan, Fareed and others we can’t tell you about yet on a sexy pilgrimage across space, time and trauma. No Auto-Tuning. No Trigger Warnings. All Feels Amplified.”

Maarten de Boer

For the uninitiated, those names are major. Gabrielle is Lestat’s mother and the first person he ever turned into a vampire. Nicolas is Nicki de Lenfent, the young lover of Lestat’s played by Joseph Potter who first appeared in this season’s “No Pain” episode. In TVL, we learn that the two struck up a friendship before Lestat was given the Dark Gift…by the much-mentioned and horrible Magnus. And Marius? Well, we already know that he’s the 2,000-year-old vampire who turned Armand (Assad Zaman), but he’s also got ties to Those Who Must Be Kept, a.k.a. the progenitors of all vampires, Enkil and Akasha—who, by the way, gets her own origin story in The Vampire Chronicle’s third book, Queen of the Damned.

“When you buy the rights to 18 Anne Rice novels that have sold more than 150 million copies, in your wildest dreams you hope there’s a show as good as Interview on the other end,” says Dan McDermott, president of entertainment and AMC Studios for AMC Networks in the official announcement. “What Rolin has done with these stories and characters, working so closely with Mark, as the steward of this universe, has exceeded the loftiest version of our expectations. We can’t wait to see where this creative team takes the series from here and know we are walking alongside an incredibly loyal and passionate base of fans who feel as strongly about this material as we do.”

Jones said: “Thank you to the brilliant casts and crews of the first two seasons that got us to this day. Thank you to the rabid, beautifully unwell fandom that scaled the castle walls to get us to this day. Thank you to Dan McDermott, Ben Davis for the funds and tools to continue the great work of dramatizing Anne Rice’s extraordinary novels. And sincere apologies to the family and friends of actor Sam Reid, for the possession that continues to this day. Monsieur L extends his promise to return his body upon cancellation…may that evening never come.”

Don’t even joke about that, Jones. We’re already half-broken by what went down in last week’s episode. And what happens in this weekend’s phenomenal season finale may actually leave us all undead.